Here is a poet of America’s playground battle zones; his name is chaos and he is your friend. Actually, his name is Dustin Holland, and his collection Duckwalking Is The Only Way Out Of Armageddon looks into the glimmer of the gutter and sees something in the sick kaleidoscope worth sharing. This collection makes the modern mess primitive and evocative; accessible and compelling, even when it’s the end of world.

it’s hard to play fiddle while the world burns around you sitting under a red moon in apocalypse gardens with nothing to read

“Acrylic Flowers,” P. 22

But it’s not fun, no matter what R.E.M says, because there’s no more poetry; there are no more words in an occult world—a constant unknown, a wilderness.

In Duckwalking Is The Only Way Out Of Armageddon, readers will find brave, self-conscience writing­ written in code, which builds mystic, poetic tales. And as with poetry, the content more than the sentence structure is what matters. In this book, readers will find an undignified life, the worship of idols—pop stars and superheroes—in convoluted syntax in a wrld of wrds—something like what’s found in text messages: shorthand for short sighted minds. A little grammar and a lot of images moves the book along with short, one word lines.

The collection not only embraces, if only to critique and chaff the age in which it was written, the writer lets the reader know that his age is a subject as well. In poems such as “Cartoon Villains,” “Steady,” “Lost In Looney Toons,” “Kid,” and the book’s title poem all foretell a playful apocalypse that will be carried out in the same carefree manner in which the young live their lives. There is an endearing self-consciousness in the collection; there’s a great deal of writing about writing: meta-poetry.

I am an enemy of the state because my god is the poem because i don’t believe in violence or green paper

“I Am An Enemy Of The State,” P. 34

Holland’s fathers are the Beats, and he recognizes and embraces the romanced ‘fifties in “Longmnt Poem,” which is aware of the way the world has been wound-up in the many decades since then. This, though, if the only hint of sentimentality in the collection: the freedom of the ‘fifties, when our brains saw better days.

Thankfully, though, Dustin Holland will be back.

I won’t move/ a gddamned inch/ until/ the poem/ is finished/ until the city/ is the poem/ is gd(“And I’ll,” P. 14)

Readers should want to experience Holland’s paradoxical images again, because it’s rare, in Hollywood’s rotten years, that a person can experience only images as opposed to explained emotions; when our mind’s eye can set the scene to the tune of images: the disgust what we don’t want to see around us.